Movie Review: The Revenant

Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman) strives for the little golden man again with Oscar-nominated The Revenant.

Revenant is a noun for someone who returns, most often as a ghost or a spirit.  Well, Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio, Critters 3) returns in this film alright....with a vengeance.  He is a frontiersman and fur trader in the 1800s in a group led by Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson, Ex Machina).  He, at one point, gets mauled by a bear to near death.  With Native Americans on their tail, most of the group move ahead to get help from a nearby fort.  They leave two men behind, Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy, Mad Max: Fury Road) and Bridger (Will Poulter, The Maze Runner), to tend to Glass.  Fitzgerald already has a problem with Glass and tricks Bridger into going with him and leaving Glass for dead.  Needless to say, Glass survives the ordeal and overcomes every obstacle to catch up with Fitzgerald and get his revenge.

Despite the distraction of Native Americans and the French and everything else, this movie boils down to a simple tale of revenge.  This is mostly DiCaprio's film.  A lot of buzz about his acting, and by now we know he is up for an Academy Award.  I thought he was great and he really looked like he was trying to act his heart out, but that was part of the problem.  Through much of the movie, his character is near death, so it is a lot of close-ups of his face while he puts on a real strained look and grunts a lot.  That doesn't make it bad by any means.  For what he needs to do, he still does it well.  The one man who kept up with him was Tom Hardy.  Here he plays an angry man who really needs to learn to enunciate, and we all know by now just how well he plays that role.  There were really no bad performances in the lot.  Poulter is proving to be one to look out for and then there is Gleeson.  He has had a heck of a year between this, Star Wars, and Ex Machina.

Another stand out performance came from Emmanuel Lubezki, the cinematographer.  The Revenant has been well documented as having been filmed entirely with only natural lighting.  What Lubezki does with that is nothing short of breathtaking.  Most of this was filmed in cold, snowy locations.  The way it's shot, you can almost feel the cold oozing off the screen.  There is a real bleak look to the film, but in a beautiful way.  The only bad thing is that this almost gets too distracting.  There are a few cut scenes that just show shot after shot of landscapes before getting back to the story at hand.  I know it's a weird nitpick to have...."stop showing me gorgeous images!"  I think it just helped push the length a little over what it needed to be.  For being a simple revenge story, this film is quite lengthy.

On the opposite end of the beautiful scenery is everything else.  When it's in the meat of the story (much like Glass gets in the carcass of a deer), this film can be quite brutal.  When I mentioned before that Glass gets mauled by a bear, I meant brutally mauled.  They do not hold back showing this bear rip into him.  Through the rest of the film he goes through a lot more pain.  It does not seem too much though.  There is a theme running through the film about survival and not giving up.  In flashbacks, his wife tells him that "as long as you can still draw a breath, you fight.  You breathe."  He shows just how much he believes that by surviving some insurmountable odds.

There is not a lot of story here, but if a revenge story is what you love, then this is a great choice.  The film gets a little long, but that is the biggest complaint that I can give for it.  Some of it can be a little brutal and hard to watch, but if you can handle that then I would really recommend this.  If you decide to see this, please do yourself a favor and try to catch it on the big screen.  The cinematography alone will make it worth your trip.

Memorable Quote:

Hugh Glass: I ain't afraid to die anymore.  I'd done it already.